Her Discovery Wasn’t Alien Life, but Science Has Never Been the Same
With TV cameras pointed at her, Felisa Wolfe-Simon began speaking at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 2, 2010.“I’ve discovered — I’ve led a team that has discovered — something that I’ve been thinking about for many years,” Dr. Wolfe-Simon said. She was at that time a visiting researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, speaking to a sizable audience of journalists and bloggers, two of them wearing tinfoil hats, and hordes of streamers online.Days before, NASA had teased “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Speculation that NASA had discovered some kind of alien life bred exponentially across nascent social media platforms.Dr. Wolfe-Simon had, unfortunately, not found aliens, nor had she ever said she did. But she had fo...